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Msgr. Higgins Receives Laetare Medal from University of Notre Dame By Catholic News Service  May 22, 2001         NOTRE DAME, Ind. (CNS) -- Msgr. George Higgins, veteran labor priest, received the 2001 Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame during the university's May 20 commencement exercises. "It is a sobering experience but obviously also a very high honor to be enrolled this afternoon in the company of so many of the most illustrious figures in the modern history of American Catholicism," Msgr. Higgins said during the ceremony at which President Bush gave the commencement address.  The Laetare Medal was established in 1883 as an annual award to a Catholic who has contributed to society. The first Laetare Medal was given to John Gilmary Shea, a pre-eminent historian of the American Catholic Church. Msgr. Higgins took Shea's middle name -- Gilmary -- as his confirmation name.         In accepting the award, Msgr. Higgins said, "Let me be the first to say with unfeigned modesty that my unusual middle name, adopted in memory of John Gilmary Shea, may be the only thing I have in common with any of the previous recipients of the Laetare Medal."         Previous Laetare Medal winners have included Catholic Worker foundress Dorothy Day, novelist Walker Percy, Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and death-penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean, a Sister of St. Joseph of Medaille.         Msgr. Higgins, an expert in church social teachings who has spent most of his priestly life advocating labor causes, said he hoped the symbolism of this year's Laetare Medal would keep alive the church's commitment to the poor. He quoted part of a document written by Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore in 1887 that said,  "It is evidently of supreme importance that the church should always be found on the side of humanity, of justice to the multitude who comprise the body of the human family." "That remains as true today as it was at the end of the 19th century,'' Msgr. Higgins told the Notre Dame graduating class, their families and school officials. He said Cardinal Gibbons was writing at a time when the overwhelming majority of Catholics in the United States were impoverished immigrants.         Today, the priest said, he fears that because "many, but by no means all American Catholics are more prosperous than their immigrant forebears," they may "fail to realize that we are still a nation of immigrants -- perhaps even more so than we were at the end of the 19th century."         He also disputed those who say that evangelization of the poor and new immigrants should be exclusively spiritual. "That's a seductive half-truth," Msgr. Higgins said, pointing out that the church's role in helping immigrants and the poor is a complex one that leaves "ample room for honest differences of opinion."         He said the rationale that evangelization efforts to the poor remain only spiritual "finds no support anywhere in the entire corpus of Catholic social teaching, least of all in the social teaching of Pope John Paul II."        The priest also said he was confident that the University of Notre Dame would continue to contribute to the "evangelical commitment" expressed by Cardinal Gibbons, not only for its students, but also for the wider church in the United States.          The Laetare Medal is the latest in a string of honors for the priest's 60 years as a labor activist, author and university professor. Last year, Msgr. Higgins received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at White House ceremonies presided over by President Clinton. This February, he was honored by United Auto Workers officials for his work with the UAW Public Review Board. Msgr. Higgins was a founding member of the board and its chairman from 1966 until he retired from the board last September.         Msgr. Higgins, who was born in Chicago in 1916 and was ordained for the Chicago Archdiocese in 1940, has spent most of his life in Washington working on the national and international levels on issues involving workers' rights and social justice.For 36 years he worked for the U.S. bishops' national conference in Washington in the area of social action. He also has spent 24 years at The Catholic University of America; he was a graduate student there in economics in the 1940s and has taught courses on social ethics and labor since 1980.         In the 1970s, he played a key role in mediating the settlement of grape strikes and the first United Farm Worker contracts with grape growers in California. In the early 1980s, he was a principal liaison between U.S. labor and the fledgling Solidarity union in Poland.     Papal Social Encyclicals   Other Catholic Social Teachings General Articles of Interest  Catholic Worker Connection Msgr. George Higgins  Home Page E-Mail: Fr. Sinclair Oubre